InsideOut
by VisionaryZephyr
Summary: Since his experience in the room, all Henry really wanted was to be free of Room 302. But trauma has a way of sticking to your insides, and never letting go... Oneshot.


**Prologue**

_Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. - Scott Adams._

He didn't dream anymore.

No good dreams, no bad dreams. He figured he should probably be thankful for that. It made waking up marginally easier. Henry's eyes opened, firstly, to the blurry image of a ceiling fan over his bed and soft light filtering in through his windows. This alone was enough to alarm him. "Not again!" He blurted; shooting up and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, and, incidentially, right into the box he'd packed his photos in. Box? What the hell was that doing there? He removed his feet from the variety of glossy photos and unused frames and rested his head in his hands. He gathered his wits over the soft _whoosh_ of the fan. It had been almost two years since he'd left South Ashfield, and he was getting further and further from it with each move... yet, each place he took up residence in reminded him of room 302. It was as if the cursed place was following him, determined to haunt him for the rest of his life, a life that would never be normal again because of Walter Sullivan and his _fucked up_ world and the death, always the death, and the bloody decomposed walls, the rotted bodies reaching blindly from his apartment walls, and Joseph Cynthia Jasper Andrew Richard Eileen... _Eileen._ Henry choked back a sob, jerking forward into a slow rocking motion on the edge of his bed, curling up into himself. The therapy he'd recieved hadn't helped for long, though he liked to let everyone believe it had. The pills weren't helping either, Henry realized this even as he reached for the bottle on his bedside table, yet he wrenched the cap off and stared into the semi-transparent orange abyss of the bottle at the single pill that lay at the very bottom. Henry gazed into the bottle for a while, reflecting on his situation-- he felt like that pill, a small, nondescript capsule that might be empty if someone hadn't filled it up with some kind of bitter something-or-other, sitting at the bottom of an abyss it couldn't get out of until someone upturned it again... He barked out a laugh. That whole similie was stupid to him, probably the artist in him trying to make something poetic of it. He popped the cap back onto the bottle and put it back on his nightstand. He hated waking up like that.

He made a mental note to make sure that his next bedroom did not have a ceiling fan as he rose, picking up the box of photographs and setting it on his desk before wandering out into the kitchen. At least this place felt like a home and not some sort of temporary reprieve, or worse, a prison. Then again, that's how room 302 felt to him before it became his prison. Like a home, a cozy little place he could spend a few peaceful years in until finding a nice young woman to fall in in love with and marry... Of course, Sullivan had other plans for him. Henry did meet a nice young woman, though. A nice young woman named Eileen, who was all bruised and beaten, with one arm in a cast and one beautiful green eye hidden under an eyepatch and whose body would be overrun with pulsing, bloody stains before she succumbed to babbling gibberish or striking her own injured arm as Walter Sullivan puppeteered her battered body... But through all that, Henry became aware of a wet puddle around his feet. He staggered backwards, swearing as he let the empty gallon of juice go flying across the room in a rage, finally slipping and falling with his back against the opposite counter. He watched the lemonade trickle off the counter from the overfilled glass, and began to cry. He'd _never_ been like this before, not before the room. Now he wasn't able to escape room 302, he was unable to move on and leave it behind. It would have him in it's monstrous clutches forever, because it was like a living thing that moved and breathed inside him. If he just had someone to share it with, anyone who would know, who would believe him...

"Eileen..."

---------------------

Henry continued unpacking, stuffing books he didn't read into sagging bookcases, putting pictures in frames, frames on shelves and tables. Everything had a certain... _dead-ness_ to it now. When he wasn't bemoaning his own failures as he had been only a few hours prior, he felt as if he was looking at his own life through the eyes of someone else. No one he knew, of course, and definitely no one like him. The world was almost constantly filled with an alien coldness, until his mind came full circle and plunged back into either visceral fear and xenophobia, or depression. Then he felt everything, and was very much himself, except he didn't want to be. Henry stuck the box of photos in his closet, next to all of the other boxes of things he didn't have space for. He returned to his livingroom and appraised it. It was clean and neat and nondescript, like usual, but for a box tucked halfway under one of his end tables. It was unmarked and as of yet unopened. "How'd I miss that?" Henry mumbled as he went and retrieved a knife to slit it open with. It was packed with reverence, the contents of it covered over with clothes (which he generally used as padding for his few delicate items), but the smell that issued forth from it caused him to crinkle his nose. It was musty and vaguely metallic, like the water prison (_don't think of that..._) "What the hell?" He uttered as he lifted the familiar looking clothes off the top. A white button down shirt, and a pair of jeans. They were dirty, which occured to him as odd, none of his clothes harbored many stains aside from a few paint splatters from his usually futile painting escapades or food stains. These stains were neither. They weren't fresh, but they were far from faded, dark and ugly brown splatters or spots decorated them like... "Blood." Henry said, looking over them. The clothes were the ones he wore throughout his time in the room. Why had he kept them? "What the hell is this?!" He shouted, throwing them across the room in a desperate attempt to get them as far from him as possible. His hands felt dirty after touching them, and he wiped them desperately on his pants to clean them of the imagined filth. The fear spread quickly from his fingertips up to his head and back down to his toes, sending him trembling. He peered into the box again, slowly, as if he expected to look back at him; before lunging into it and tossing all the contents towards the discarded clothes. Several white candles, two bizarre and archaic medallions, a rusted revolver (_Richard... God damn it, Richard_), a bottle of past-expiration nutrition drink that burst open upon making a swift and severe contact with the wall... Henry stopped as his fingers touched the dry, leather surface of his diary. His fingers closed on it, and he pulled it out to stare at it, falling back on his rear.

The red diary was full of his nightmarish memories from the room, it's pages were crinkled and dog-eared, punctuated in places with folded maps or notes he'd picked up. His hands trembled as he held it, yet he didn't want to pitch it across the room as he did with the other objects. In fact, he couldn't let it go. He rose, stumbling over to his table, and began to page through it. He stroked every page gently, as if admiring his handiwork, trying not to read it word for word. "I couldn't throw you away," Henry told the diary. "You were keeping me sane. What the hell was I supposed to do? And what do I do now? There's nobody leaving me red slips of paper to tell me how to forget everything that happened." His eyes stung with tears, but he kept paging through until he came to a blank. That's how it was for him. The nightmare, and after that everything was a blank... right up until then. Where Henry lay his hand on the blank yellowed page, a red stain began to spread. It was the colour of fresh blood, much like the diary itself, and it spread quickly over that page, and the page after it, and every page after that, right in front of Henry's disbelieving eyes. His mouth hung open as he watched, his jaw working, trying to get himself to make sound, a scream perhaps. Ultimately he grinned in a manner more reminiscent of a grimace, and let out another one of those barking laughs. "I'm going crazy." He said, as he pushed his chair back, further and further from the table. The stain was getting darker. "I'm going nuts, it's finally happening. Thank fucking God."

There's something relieving about going insane. Terrifying, yes, but ultimately relieving, because after you've gone insane you've hit rock bottom. You don't have to worry about how much lower your mind can go because it's sitting right there, like a little pill at the bottom of a bottle. You don't have to pretend anything you see or hear is real, and you don't have to convince yourself that the improbable is unreal, because you're insane, and it doesn't matter, and you aren't required or even expected to discern the real from the unreal anyway. Unfortunately for Henry Townshend, he was not insane, and what he was seeing was perfectly, horrendously real. And what Henry was seeing was that, as the page grew darker with blood, a word began to emerge. He leaned forward, slowly, until he was on the edge of his seat, and read the word that spelled itself out on the page.

"**Mother.**"


End file.
